Stalking the Nightmare

by Harlan Ellison

  Christopher Caperton knew his destiny was to hold True Love in his hands. Known to demons, casting no shadow, he walked away from the fear in Perdido Street.

  The final clue was so mundane he could not even breathe a sigh of relief. True Love had been sold in blind bid auction at Sotheby’s in April of 1979. It now belonged to a man who lived high above the rest of the human race, in a tower overlooking New York, where almost eight million people gave a portion of each day to wondering where True Love resided.

  From Siri’s notebooks Chris recognized the name of the man. In 1932 he had visited New York City for the opening of the Radio City Music Hall. The artifact had been stolen from him. He had spent forty-seven years trying to regain his lost property. In the process, somehow, he had become enormously powerful, enormously wealthy, enormously secretive.

  Home again, home again, jiggedy jig.

  Christopher Caperton took one final look at the cover of the December 1980 issue of Esquire. It showed a woman in a seductive bridal gown. The cover illustrated an article called Looking for a Wife and the slug-line read “With all the beautiful, intelligent women out there, why is she so hard to find?”

  He smiled thinking they might have done the reverse on Ms. magazine, with a photograph of an equally unreachable male.

  The model they had selected for the shot was achingly innocent, yet seductive; poised in a timeless moment of utter perfection. Had he been anyone else, this might well have been the physical manifestation of True Love for him.

  But it was only the most recent in a congeries of photos, motion pictures, billboards and women glimpsed in cars going past on city streets who were idealized manifestations of what he sought.

  Tonight he would hold the real thing. Tonight he would obtain True Love.

  He put the last of the vials from Siri’s bahut he might need in the capacious pockets of his London Fog topcoat, and left the hotel. It was thirty degrees in the Manhattan streets, and the wind was blowing in off the East River. By tomorrow, perhaps before two am, there would be snow. It was the sort of evening he had always imagined for this final leg of the journey.

  Christopher Caperton was forty years old.

  Every bribe had been well-placed. The boiler room door was unlocked. The key to the private service elevator had been properly copied. No one stopped him.

  He walked through the palatial tower suite in darkness. He heard a door closing away off in the rear of the apartment. The floor-plan he had been given was precise and he touched nothing as he walked quickly to the door of the master bedroom.

  The old man was lying in the exact center of the huge bed. As reported, he was dying.

  Chris closed the door behind him. Only one light near the bed illuminated the room. The old man opened his eyes and looked at Chris. His eyes were very blue.

  “There’s never enough money to buy silence, boy. You can buy entrance, but not silence. There’s always some mouth that’s hungrier.”

  Chris smiled and walked to the bed. “I would have tried to bargain with you if I’d thought it would do any good. I’m not a thief by profession.”

  The old man snorted softly. He didn’t seem to be in pain. “No price.”

  “Yes, I rather thought that might be the case. But look on the bright side: you can’t take it with you, it won’t do you any good on the other side; and I’ve been looking for it for a long time.”

  The old man laughed gently, no more strenuously than he had snorted. “What the hell do I care how long you looked for it, boy? Not as long as I looked for it.”

  “Since Christmas, 1932.”

  “Well, well. You did your homework, did you?”

  “I’ve paid as much as you, in all kinds of coin.”

  “Not my concern, boy. You’ll never find it.”

  “It’s here. In this room. In the safe.”

  The old man’s eyes widened. “Smarter than I thought. Didn’t stop any of that cash you were doling out; got good people working for me; didn’t see any reason why they shouldn’t pick up a few extra dollars; they’ve got families to take care of. Didn’t expect you’d know about the safe.”

  “I know about it.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You’ll look forever and never find it. Even if you do, you’ll never get it open.” He coughed shallowly, smiled at the ceiling and recited: “Hidden where you can’t find it; but if you do you’ll be looking at six foot thick walls of concrete reinforced with molybdenum-steel alloy cords, backed by a foot of tempered high-carbon high-chromium steel, another foot of unseamed silico-manganese shock-resisting steel and six inches of eighteen-tung-sten, four-chrome, one-vanadium high-speed industrial tool steel. The vault door is stainless steel faced, an inch and a half of cast steel, another twelve inches of burn-resisting steel, another inch and a half of open-hearth steel, and the pneumatic hinges are inside the sandwich. The vault door has twenty bolts, each an inch in diameter: eight on one side, eight on the other, two top and two bottom. This holds the door into a sixteen inch jamb of moly-tungsten high speed steel, set into eighteen inches of concrete crosshatched by burn-resisting steel bars running horizontally and vertically.” He coughed once more, pleased with himself, and added as a fillip, “The door’s precision-made so you can’t pour nitro in between the seam of the door and the vault.”

  Chris let a beaten look cross his face. “And I suppose that isn’t even all of it. I suppose there are thermostats that trip some kind of trap if the temperature rises … if I used a torch.”

  “You got some smarts, boy. Tear gas. And the floor gets electrified.” He was grinning widely now, but what little color had been in his face was gone. His eyes were closing.

  “You beat me,” Chris said. “I guess it’s yours to keep.”

  But the old man only heard the first part. By the end, Chris was talking to himself. The old man was gone.

  “On the other hand,” Chris said softly, “there’s no lock that can’t be opened.”

  He stood by the bed for a while, staring down at the previous owner of True Love. He didn’t seem to have died happier or sadder for having passed on with it in his possession.

  Then Christopher Caperton got down on his knees in the center of the great bedroom and took out the vial Siri had labeled Blood of Helomi and he unstoppered the vial and began sprinkling out the dusty contents in lines that formed the pentagram of Solomon. He placed the candles and lit them; and he stood in the center of the design. And he read from a smudged piece of paper twelve years old.

  And Surgat came again.

  This time it came to the tower suite; this time it did not take >Chris to the fallen temple. And this time it spoke in the soft, refined voice it had used when taking Siri’s body.

  “So soon?” Surgat said. “You need me again so soon?”

  Chris felt nausea rising in his throat. The demon had not been dining this time. It had been indulging in whatever passed for fornication among demons. Its love-partner was still attached. Whatever it was, it wasn’t human. (A momentary thought shrieked through Chris’s skull. Might it ever have been human; and might it have been … ? He slammed the lid on the thought.)

  “Twelve years … it’s been twelve years …” Chris said, with difficulty.

  Surgat let a human face appear in its stomach and the human face smiled offhandedly. “How time flies when one is enjoying oneself.” The love-partner moaned and gave a spastic twitch.

  Chris would not think of it.

  “Open the safe,” he ordered the demon.

  “I’ll need you out here to assist me. In one of my very difficult rituals.” The voice was a snake’s hiss, from the moth’s head.

  “Go fuck yourself. Open the safe.”

  “But I need you,” the demon said, wheedling disingenuously.

  Chris fished in his topcoat pocket for a scrap of parchment from the bahut. He began to read. “By the powerful Principality of the infernal abysses, I conjure thee with power and with exorcism; I warn thee hearken forthwith and i
mmediately to my words; observe them inviolably, as sentences of the last dreadful day of judgment, which thou must obey inviolably…”

  As he began to speak, a sweat of pus and blood began to break out on the demon’s armored flesh. Soft purple bruises appeared, as if Surgat were being struck from within.

  “I hear. I obey!”

  And it reached for the hair. Chris took the vial of fox hairs from his pocket, withdrew one and handed it across the invisible plane. The hair burst into flame as before, and Surgat turned, aiming the flame at the ceiling. The fire washed the ceiling of the tower suite bedroom and the ceiling opened and the central section of the floor on which Chris stood rose up on hydraulic lifts into a chamber above the penthouse.

  Then Surgat turned the flame on the stainless steel door of the vault that formed the wall of the chamber above, and the door swung open ponderously. And the vault within was revealed.

  Then Chris intoned the license to depart, but before Surgat vanished it said, “Master, powerful Master, may I leave you with a gift?”

  “No. I don’t want anything more from you, not ever again.”

  “But Master, you will need this gift. I swear by my Lord Adrammelech.”

  Chris felt terror swirl through him. “What is it?”

  “Then you willingly accept my gift without condition or let?”

  Chris heard Siri’s voice in his memory: He won’t harm you. He serves only one purpose: he opens all locks. Just be careful. “Yes, I accept the gift.”

  Surgat caused a pool of stagnant water to appear just beyond the protective design. Then the human face appeared again in the thorax of the insect Surgat had become, and the human face smiled invitingly and said, “Look,” and Surgat sucked in within itself and grew smaller and smaller and then vanished.

  Leaving the pool of foul water in which Chris saw—

  A scene from a motion picture. He recognized it. A scene from Citizen Kane. A day in 1940. The interior of the skyscraper office of the old man, Bernstein. He is being interviewed by the newsreel researcher, Thompson, who asks him what Charles Foster Kane’s dying word, “Rosebud,” meant.

  Bernstein thinks, then says, “Maybe some girl? There were a lot of them back in the early days and—”

  Thompson is amused. He says, “It’s hardly likely, Mr. Bernstein, that Mr. Kane could have met some girl casually and then, fifty years later, on his deathbed—”

  Bernstein cuts in. “You’re pretty young, Mr.—” he remembers the name, “—Mr. Thompson. A fellow will remember things you wouldn’t think he’d remember. You take me. One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on a ferry and as we pulled out there was another ferry pulling in.” Everett Sloane, as the aged Bernstein, looks wistful, speaks slowly. “And on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on … and she was carrying a white parasol… and I only saw her for one second and she didn’t see me at all … but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.” He smiles triumphantly. “See what I mean?”

  And the scene faded, and the water boiled away, and Chris was alone in the dimly-lit vault room above the tower suite. Alone with the dawning fear that he had learned too much.

  He saw himself suddenly as a human puppet, controlled from above by a nameless force that held every man and woman on the end of strings, making them dance the dance, manipulating them to seek the unobtainable, denying them peace or contentment because of the promise of a Holy Grail out there somewhere.

  Even if the strings were broken, and puny mortals wandered the blasted landscape of their lives on their own, they would finally, inevitably, tragically return to the great puppeteer; to try and retie the strings. Better to dance the hopeless dance that lied about True Love than to admit they were all alone, that they might never, never find that perfect image to become one with. He stood in the center of the pentagram of Solomon and thought of the achingly beautiful girl on the cover of Esquire. The girl who was not real. True Love. Snare and delusion? He felt tears on his cheeks, and shook his head. No, it was here. It was just inside the threshold of the vault. It existed. It had a form and a reality. The truth was only a few footsteps from him. Siri could not have died for it if it weren’t real.

  He stepped out of the magic design and walked to the door of the vault. He kept his eyes down. He stepped over the raised jamb and heard his footsteps on the steel floor.

  The vault was fit by hidden tubing at the juncture of walls and ceiling. A soft off-white glow that filled the vault.

  He looked up slowly.

  It sat on a pedestal of silver and lucite.

  He looked at True Love.

  It was an enormous loving cup. It was as gaudy as a bowling trophy. Exactly a foot and a half high, with handles. Engraved on the face were the words True Love in flowing script, embellished with curlicues. It shone with a light of its own, and the glow was the brassy color of an intramural award.

  Christopher Caperton stood with his arms hanging at his sides. It was in him, at that moment, to laugh. But he had the certain knowledge that if he laughed, he would never stop; and they would come in to get the old man’s body this morning and find him still standing there, crying piteously and laughing.

  He had come through a time and a distance to get this real artifact, and he would take it. He stepped to the pedestal and reached for it. Remembering at the last moment the demon’s gift.

  Surgat could not touch him; but Surgat could reach him.

  He looked down into the loving cup that was True Love and in the silver liquid swirling there he saw the face of True Love. For an instant it was his mother, then it was Miss O’Hara, then it was poor Jean Kettner, then it was Briony Catling, then it was Helen Gahagan, then it was Marta Toren, then it was the girl to whom he had lost his virginity, then it was one woman after another he had known, then it was Siri—but was Siri no longer than any of the others—then it was his wife, then it was the face of the achingly beautiful bride on the cover of Esquire, and then it resolved finally into the most unforgettable face he had ever seen. And it stayed.

  It was no face he recognized.

  Years later, when he was near death, Christopher Caperton wrote the answer to the search for True Love in his journal. He wrote it simply, as a quotation from the Japanese poet Tanaka Katsumi.

  What he wrote was this:

  “1 know thai my true friend will appear after my death, and my sweetheart died before I was born.”

  In that instant when he saw the face of True Love, Christopher Caperton knew the awful gift the demon had given him. To reach the finest moment of one’s life, and to know it was the finest moment, that there would never be a more golden, more perfect, nobler or loftier or thrilling moment… and to continue to have to live a life that was all on the downhill side.

  That was the curse and the blessing.

  He knew, at last, that he way worthy of such a thing. In torment and sadness he knew he was just that worthy, and no more.

  But it’s easy to be smart… later.

  THE OUTPOST UNDISCOVERED BY TOURISTS

  A tale of three kings and a star for this sacred season

  They camped just beyond the perimeter of the dream and waited for first light before beginning the siege.

  Melchior went to the boot of the Rolls and unlocked it. He rummaged about till he found the air mattress and the inflatable television set, and brought them to the cleared circle. He pulled the cord on the mattress and it hissed and puffed up to its full size, king size. He pulled the plug on the television set and it hissed and firmed up and he snapped his fingers and it turned itself on.

  “No,” said Kaspar, “I will not stand for it! Not another night of roller derby. A King of Orient I are, and I’ll be damned if I’ll lose another night’s sleep listening to those barely primate creatures dropkicking each other!”

  Melchior glowed with his own night light. “So sue me,” he said, settling down on the air mattress, tidying his moleskin
cape around him. “You know I’ve got insomnia. You know I’ve got a strictly awful hiatus hernia. You know those lathes are sitting right here on my chest like millstones. Be a person for a change, a mensch, it couldn’t hurt just once.”

  Kaspar lifted the chalice of myrrh, the symbol of death, and shook it at Melchior. “Hypochondriac! That’s what you are, a fake, a fraud. You just like watching those honkytonk bimbos punching each other out Hiatus hernia, my fundament! You’d watch mud wrestling and extol the esthetic virtues of the balletic nuances. Turn it off … or at least, in the name of Jehovah, get the Sermonette.”

  “The ribs are almost ready,” Balthazar interrupted. “You want the mild or the spicy sauce?”

  Kaspar raised his eyes to the star far above them, out of reach but maddeningly close. He spoke to Jehovah: “And this one goes ethnic on us. Wandering Jew over there drives me crazy with the light that never dims, watches institutionalized mayhem all night and clanks all day with gold chains … and Black-is-Beautiful over there is determined I’ll die of tertiary heartburn before I can even find the Savior. Thanks, Yahweh; thanks a lot. Wait till you need a favor.”

  “Mild or spicy?” Balthazar said with resignation.

  “I’d like mine with the mild,” Melchior said sweetly. “And just a bissel apple sauce on the side, please.”

  “I want dimsum,” Kaspar said. His malachite chopsticks materialized in his left hand, held far up their length indicating he was of the highest caste.

  “He’s only being petulant,” Melchior said. “He shouldn’t annoy, Balthazar sweetie. Serve them cute and tasty ribs.”

  “Deliver me,” Kaspar murmured.

  So they ate dinner, there under the star. The Nubian king, the Scrutable Oriental king, and the Hebrew king. And they watched the roller derby. They also played the spelling game called ghost, but ended the festivity abruptly and on a rancorous note when Balthazar and Melchior ganged up on Kaspar using the word “pringles,” which Kaspar contended was not a generic but a specific trade name. Finally they fell asleep, the television set still talking to itself, the light from Melchior reflecting ofi the picture tube.